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Daphne Bramham: Canada’s commitment to 25,000 refugees must be met

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Daphne Bramham

Publishing date:

November 18, 2015 • 4 minute read

A woman and her children walk to a registration camp after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border on Tuesday. More than 800,000 refugees and migrants have landed in Europe so far this year and more than 3,000 have died while crossing the Mediterranean in search of a new life.DIMITAR DILKOFF/ AFP/Getty Images

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Concern about who Canada lets in as part of its commitment to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees here by year’s end rose after one of the terrorists in last week’s attacks in Paris apparently had a fake Syrian passport that he used to enter Europe.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall and other federal Conservatives have called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to suspend his plan.

No one wants to import terrorists, probably least of all the nascent Liberal government. So it is reasonable to wonder whether Canada is doing, or will do, enough to ensure that.

But what Canada is proposing is different from the situation imposed on Western European countries with 700,000 Syrians and others flooding their borders to escape both armed conflict and horrible economies in their homelands.

What’s been muddled ever since Alan Kurdi’s tiny body was photographed on a Turkish beach is that there are two distinct groups of people that Canada (and other countries) accept. There are refugees and asylum-seekers, two very different categories created by the 1951 United Nations’ Refugee Convention.

A refugee is someone who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”

As of Nov. 3, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees had registered 4,287,293 Syrians who meet that definition.

Those others who have arrived and continue to flood into Western Europe are asylum seekers, defined by the UN Convention as “someone who says he or she is a refugee, but whose claim has not yet been definitively evaluated.”

Because of Canada’s distance from the conflicts and desperation that have produced an estimated 60 million refugees worldwide, we have an advantage.

Few asylum seekers show up at our airports and border crossings. And when we do take refugees, Canada is able to pick and choose from those already screened by the UNHCR or by friends and family who are being privately sponsored.

For decades, Canada has followed the same protocol for screening, whether it was in 1980 when 19,323 were admitted or last year when only 6,500 were allowed in.

It starts with the UNHCR’s list. From that, UNHCR provides a shorter list to Canada that ranks cases by their vulnerability.

Its criteria for vulnerability includes: victims of violence, torture, gender abuse such as rape, women who are alone, unaccompanied children, the elderly, and LGBTQ.

Members of ethnic and religious minorities may be included among the vulnerable. And while belonging to a minority group doesn’t necessarily mean individuals are more vulnerable, UNHCR’s Canadian representative Furio De Angeli said it is likely that more refugees belong to a minority group. (It bears noting that President Bashar al-Assad is a member of the Alawite minority in mainly Sunni Syria.)

Canadian officials go through those files, choose and then interview the individuals and families. Background security checks are done by Canadian officials, as are medical examinations.

Then, the potential refugees go back to their camps to wait until they are processed, and that can take years.

There are also privately sponsored refugees who receive the same kind of screening, although their names are initially put forward by friends or family through permit holders such as faith organizations.

And there are some whose cases come to the attention of visa officers in the countries where the refugee camps are and those visa officers refer the individuals or families to permit-holders asking whether they could sponsor them. They are call “blended visa officer referred cases” or BVORs.

Certainly, recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut and Ankara, as well as the bombing of a Russian airliner, should give us pause.

But those attacks do not change the fact that millions of refugees are living in camps that are little more than shanty towns, especially since UNHCR has had to scale back provisions after only 40 per cent of the promised international aid materialized.

There are another four million displaced Syrians living outside such camps, drawing down their own savings with little or no prospect for employment in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

Until Syria’s civil war, most of its people were middle-class professionals and skilled workers with homes to go to every night. Now, UNHCR estimates that 85 per cent of those living in Jordan are surviving below the poverty line of $3 day a day.

No amount of Canadian generosity can solve this refugee crisis. But we can do our part.

Like Parisians who joined in the public mourning following last week’s attack, Canadians must demonstrate that we will not be deterred from acting as civilized people, which includes treating those in need with humanity and compassion.

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